MONICA FRANCOIS
MARCEL
Partner and Co-Founder
 With over
nineteen years’ experience leading communication, training and development projects
around the world, Monica is skilled in relating with people from a variety of industry, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Her specialty is helping to develop global skills and mindsets among
North Americans to succeed among culturally diverse workplaces, markets, and project teams--foreign or domestic. Clients range from Fortune
100 companies and international professional associations, to
world class universities and the U.S. Peace Corps.
Monica
is also adjunct faculty for the MBA program at
Loyola University Chicago.
She has been quoted in the Chicago Tribune,
Boston Globe,
Toronto Star,
Ottawa Citizen and Frommer's Budget Travel.
She is the coauthor of the newly published
"Cultural Detective®: Global Business Ethics"
volume and for McGraw-Hill/Irwin she authored a
university-level textbook chapter titled
"Global
Communications" published in Fall 2005.
For the past few years Monica has been on the
forefront of the India-North America
cross-cultural business nexus, developing a body
of original research that includes many hundred
interviews with managers and teams informing
best practices for fully leveraging the
opportunities present when working with India. A
handbook she co-authored for developing
non-profit agencies in the former-Soviet Union
has also been translated into three languages.
Monica's primary responsibilities lie in
supporting companies in their development of a
global intercultural competence curriculum to
develop cross-cultural business skills and
connect to the local business
case for global diversity in their U.S.,
Asian, South African, Latin American, and
European operations. Recent research regarding
the complexities of remote performance
management and people leadership in defined by
distance and virtual technologies has expanded
this body of work for Indian, North American and
European teams.
Monica has
also managed the localization and worldwide delivery of
global compliance and ethics initiatives in seven languages for a large agro-industry multinational company, for over 1400 of their employees on four continents. She regularly customizes country-specific programs for internationally relocating managers from
leading firms, and directs culture-general development for boards of directors, international businesspeople and managers
across who work with multi-cultural markets and diverse employees. Monica serves, as well, on the U.S. Peace Corps’
Staging team with responsibility over pre-departure programs for Americans departing on two-year international
development assignments.
A
frequent presenter, Monica is regularly
invited to speak on the topic of
intercultural competency and global
diversity at major professional conferences
and university forums.
Monica’s expertise and perspective grow from work and travels in over 30 countries. In the late 1990s she lived in Eastern Europe
in Latvia as an international development consultant
for engineering and infrastructure projects with multinational teams from
the Baltic states, Spain, Germany, Romania, Hungary, Sweden, and Denmark.
She has worked in partnership on several ventures proposed for European Union funding and closely with entrepreneurs, business leaders, technical experts, community organizers, and Ministry officials. Early in her career she was a senior program officer for the Transportation Research Board’s Transit Cooperative Research Program and a metropolitan planner with the U.S. Department of Transportation. There she directed consensus-building around policy and technical issues with the largest and most diverse communities in the U.S., and coordinated technology sharing, communication, and education programs with committees of international scope and membership.
Monica is a Returned Peace
Corps Volunteer and considers it a privilege
to support the American Field Service (AFS) and National Peace Corps Association.
She is on the Advisory Council for the
Center for International Business Education
an Research (CIBER) at the University of
Illinois, and a board member of the Society for Intercultural Training, Education and Research (SIETAR-USA.)
She is professionally active in the Ethics and
Compliance Officers Association and Society
for Corporate Compliance and Ethics; the OD
Network; the Human Resource Management Association of Chicago (HRMAC;) her local chapter of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD;) and the
Professional Women's Club of Chicago.
Monica earned her Master's degree in civil engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, with a thesis focused on transportation and multi-organizational planning projects in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Her undergraduate degree is from North Carolina
State University in Raleigh. A brief fellowship in Sustainable Development Studies later brought her to the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm, Sweden. Today she pursues on-going studies
through the Intercultural Communication
Institute in Oregon with a focus on best practices for global organizations.
She resides with her husband
Anthony in Chicago, Illinois USA.
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